I really enjoyed discussing the different information literacy pieces we collected ourselves for reading this week. My small group noted how difficult it is to attempt a general definition of information literacy; people in different areas of work or study with different capabilities and different goals will have different needs. A good approach to info lit education would be to approach from an area of interest to the user/student, and teach so that they understand the principles that they will be able to apply to other areas and situations. Out of the class discussion we seemed to come up with an agreement that, while libraries are a great place to promote information literacy, librarians still have to hurdle the uncertainty of the term and face the difficulty of finding a beginning point to build from.
And what sort of people do we see coming to us? Especially in academic libraries, people seek librarians' help when they are at a lower, more stressed point in their assignments or research cycle. We need to be conscious of patrons' places in Kuhlthau's Information Search Process cycle, to try to be understanding, BUT also to realize why trying to educate students and patrons before they have sufficient motivation to learn/absorb our lessons may not be effective. It might be a better tiing to give a librarian talk to a class when they're most likely to be starting to feel the pressure on a research project (try to find that point between "feeling the pressure" and "panic and high stress."
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